Tuesday, April 24, 2018

More SONFF, Node Red, and MQTT testing

Below is my simple lash up of the DHT-11 sensor to the basic SONOFF switch using the unused GPIO. I am powering it via the FTDI board. This works great for the sensor and LED on the SONOFF but does not fully operate the relay. I did this so I could range test the Wifi and actually had it powered by a USB battery pack. The range was great, good signal in the house and back yard.
The Node Red UI screen below shows the use of the chart function to plot the WiFi signal level and DHT-11 temperature. The Node Red code is HERE

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

SONOFF Wireless switches, Node-RED, Tasmota, and MQTT

I have been busy playing with SONOFF wireless switches, both the Basic and the 4CH. I have developed some Arduino IDE based firmware for both devices here on GitHub,

I am also looking at an alternative to OpenHAB for home automation using Node-RED (the coolest software I have ever seen to date) and MQTT Mosquitto all running on Docker. I am running it on a PC with Vagrant but I would like to move it to Raspberry Pi Zero W. The idea being two or more running a Docker swarm for the Node-RED and MQTT services. I want to figure out a way to make it highly available using something like Keepalived. My Node-RED flows are here onGitHub. Today I just loaded the alternate firmware for the SONOFF's --> Tasmota. It is very powerful. So far I got the MQTT mode working with Node-RED and I added a DHT11 sensor (super cool).